Time-Lapse Video of Living Zen Sand Art Coffee Table

Check out this amazing time-lapse video of the Sisyphus 1, a living zen, kinetic, sand art coffee table. It was crowd funded on Kickstarter in 2016, where it raised US$1.9 million from 1,992 backers. MentalFlossnoted Monday that the company—Sisyphus Industries—has a commercial website in development while it finishes ramping up production capability for the device. The premise is captivating. The table has a bed of fine sand under glass. A steel ball is controlled by a mechanism underneath the sand. That mechanism uses magnetism to push the ball in intricate patterns across the sand, drawing amazing patterns in the process. Once a pattern is complete, the table starts on a new pattern (until it’s turned off). It’s lit, too, which you control from a smartphone. I could watch the videos all day long. I can’t even imagine how captivating the real table would be. The video I embedded below is a time-lapse, but there are many more videos on the original Kickstarter project, including one with lots of closeups of the ball rolling in the sand.